![]() ![]() They get pride of place, in fact, rising up from the ground floor, across the atrium from the children’s section, in terraced stacks, like a vineyard of words. The Hunters Point library is prepared for those roles, but along with the free Wi-Fi and the outlets and the comfy furniture, it also still has … books. They are places to learn languages, register to vote, apply for jobs and colleges, get online, and take refuge from wintry weather or stormy homes. ![]() It’s a truism that today’s libraries are more than just repositories of bound volumes. Loud little voices bounce against a bamboo wall that curls like a breaking wave, tossing the sound back into the fray and keeping it from ricocheting off into quieter areas. This section of the library both opens out to the city and gathers kids into its embrace. From this vantage point, only a couple dozen feet above the ground, a space that an oligarch might covet but that’s free and open to the public, you can see the sweep of the East River, where Jet Skis and the occasional seaplane have replaced the barge traffic of a century ago the industrial relics of Gantry Plaza State Park the idealistic modernism of the United Nations and the finest skyline that capitalism has wrought. Farther along the indoor cliff path is a children’s room thoughtfully designed for small people: Even the window dips down close enough to the floor for a toddler to sit on the sill.Īnd what a window! If I were to introduce first-time visitors to the concept of Manhattan, I might start here. There, they’ll find a set of bleachers ready for story time, watched over by a librarian’s command post. Young children will quickly know to turn left. The first few steps take you to a landing where two staircases converge and the great window opens up on the riverfront park and the skyline beyond. Stair-climbing adventures can leave out plenty of people, but here, even if you zip up by elevator, each level and recess has a role of its own, and a different vista both inside and out. You can see in all directions, and yet, at various points along the way, you pause to realize that you’re not quite sure how you got to where you’re standing or what comes next. A pathway of stairs and ramps works its way up and around the central void, through a luminous landscape clad in blond bamboo. The interior unfolds slowly, like a good yarn. Holl’s no slouch in the drama department, but he’s not one to give away the whole show in one ta-dah. A lot of architects design for that first contact, bedazzling the eye with the illusion of movement. Step inside, and the building changes character. Holl begins each of his designs as a watercolor, and sometimes that two-dimensional DNA endures. It draws the eye, not with bulk or flamboyant form but with a series of gestures, like brushstrokes on raw canvas. The library has a fine waterfront presence, tall enough not to vanish, low enough to set off against the bristling towers at its shoulders. In certain light, it’s the glassed shapes that look solid, floating in the walls’ negative space. Closer still, the monolithic exterior resolves into a silvery concrete skin furrowed and marked by fibers, as if it had just woken from a nap on a bed of straw. From Gantry Plaza State Park, you begin to follow how the windows form like drops of molten metal, flowing along staircases and jumping across floors. From across the river, it’s a pale-gray box, scored by luminous gashes. Like Holl’s recently opened Kennedy Center extension, the library gets sharper and subtler the closer you get. ![]() But the result is a work of civic pride, the kind that one generation builds for the next. Yes, this project has been in the works so long that some of the children it was conceived for now have kids of their own. Yes, you can read to toddlers in a blind brick box just as well as in a purpose-built nook with views of the United Nations. A fine library is not just a frill but a declaration of democratic purpose. There’s only so much money with which to meet an infinite number of demands, and it’s easy to sneer at a $40 million library when, to pluck just one item from the list of outrages, residents of public-housing projects are living with lead paint but no heat. Lovely, late, and overpriced, the new Hunters Point Community Library, designed by Steven Holl Architects, has already become an equivocal lesson in what, and how well, the city can build. The perpetually almost-finished library on the Long Island City waterfront is truly finished now, its opening eagerly awaited by a neighborhood that transformed while the project made its way from the hey-what-if-we stage to the first checkout. ![]()
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